imagico wanted to add some points to the vector tile discussion, so he wrote a blog post. He dampens the euphoria by highlighting technical issues and pointing to the limited number of developers in OSM.

Ilya Zverev, Vladimir Elistratov, Timofey Subbotin, Daniil Kirsanov and Viktor Shcherb recorded an 83 minute podcast in Russian at the SotM in Milan summarising what they saw and learned during the conference. Ilya posted a short overview in his user diary and a link to the full transcript in English.

Mapping

Some national parks require the decontamination of footwear to stop the spread of contaminants. Voting has opened on a proposal for the tagging of footwear decontamination stations.

Community

No node, way or relation will be left behind. A property owner deleted ways in OSM as they were private roads and the owner had previously experienced unpleasant incidents with police involvement. After a long discussion in the changeset comments the delete was reverted and the ways in question were marked as private.

Chetan Gowda wrote an article describing how he used Mapolution to visualise the evolution of OSM in different countries. He explained how to install the required software on a Mac and described his workflow in his comprehensive post.

In a tweet Bertrand Billoud congratulated the Senegalese OSM community for having mapped the public transport network of the operator Dakar Dem Dikk in Dakar. According to an SotM France presentation, 11 parties collaborated to achieve the common goal.

The Mapbox blog carries an interview with Clifford Snow who explains how he is helping to map every road in Washington State. He describes the toolchain, source datasets and his motivation to provide as much help as he can to improve OSM in his home state.

Frederik Ramm points to a paper , published in the journal Big Data and Society, about technology development in OSM from a sociological point of view. The author says that lack of development in the data structures for more than 10 years is mainly caused by the “dominant position of few project members who are able to change the software design“. In the only answer on the mailing list, John Whelan questions the need for change as described by the author of the paper.

Xamanu translated his article, originally published by the Austrian Scientific Exchange Service, in the osm.org user diaries explaining how the mapping for OSM at the end of the world in the Himalayas in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan is carried out. Students of a nearby university used GPS, pen and paper and other old-school techniques in order to generate a map that helps local inhabitants with their basic needs, including the improvement of their water supply, which was the central theme there.

Imports

User omgitsgela writes a summary of their workflow for fixing imported addresses in Massachusetts, and some updates on urban micro-mapping.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSM Foundation Operations Team is looking for a new tile cache or a new rendering server to reduce load on the two existing tile caches in North America. Further information about the OSMF’s Tile CDN can be found on the OSM wiki.

OpenStreetMap Belgium is now a local chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. According to a forum post the announcement was made on Day 3 of the SotM; a video of the day is available at YouTube

Events

ODCamp 6, an open data ‘unconference’, scheduled on November 3-4 in Aberdeen, sold out its first batch of tickets. Your next chance is on August 15 at 4 pm.

Humanitarian OSM

OpenStreetMap Peru participates in the humanitarian project in Yauyos province (north of Lima) launched by the volunteer association Unidad4x4 after the region suffered from extremely cold weather. Updated maps of the region enabled the helpers to locate villages and provide medicine, food and warm clothes more efficiently.

Pierre Béland tweeted about the Ebola Outbreak Response tasks for north DR Congo and published on the OpenDataLabRDC Blog a Building Geometry analysis of task 4947. Topological analysis shows that only 3.5% of buildings have irregular forms (i.e. not 90 degrees or regular angles). This offers a different angle for validation / correction of buildings.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a podcast including a transcript, featuring Tyler Radford, HOT director, with the title “Nonprofit Creates Maps to Aid in Relief Efforts Around the World”.

Maps

The makers behind a curb map explain in an article at medium.com how they use OSM data to build maps of curbs for Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle.

kocio-pl proposes to change the colour for landuse=farmland in OSM Carto in this pull request. Mathijs Melissen proposes to further clean up mid zoom levels in order to improve readability of the map.

switch2OSM

Software

Terrestris, a German GIS company, points out on their blog that they developed GeoStyler, an online editor for OpenLayers and OGC SLD rendering styles together with Meggsimum.

Wille Marcel shared the recent and future improvements for OSMCha, a validation tool for OSM, in Milan at SotM 2018. The slides are available here and the video of the talk is on YouTube.

Programming

Ever walked in a city where lifts, funiculars, ferries or other mechanised infrastructure are essential to get around? Routing engines do not always support them. Guillaume Rischard discusses how they possibly could in his SotM talk in Milan.

Tom Chadwin made a QGIS plugin available on GitHub that exports your QGIS map to an OpenLayers/Leaflet webmap.

Thomas Hervey proposes a pull request to add a QA section in iD that will display issues such as those coming from KeepRight, an automatic data consistency check.

Nikolai Janakiev, who the regular reader of the weeklyOSM may already know due to his data science projects with OSM, Python and Blender, has written a guide that can help you if you want to load OSM data from the Overpass API into Python. The article covers the OSM data model briefly, an Overpass API introduction, the direct download in XML or JSON or the use of a wrapper and also a quick visualisation with matplotlib.

xamanu shared two articles about public transport on his user diary at osm.org.
In his first article he describes how they rewrote a tool that generates a GTFS file based on OSM data as they needed the data for the first proper bus map of a Central American city. You can find the tool at GitHub.
In his second article he explains how OSM public transport data were then made available to people’s smartphones in Nicaragua. As xamanu laid out they made the GTFS data available for different services and apps: transit.land , Navitia, Transportr and TransitApp.

Releases

Developers announce iD 2.10.0, which now handles OSM notes, the new Detach Node functionality, and a resizable photo viewer. See the full changelog for more details.

Did you know …

… the tool latest-changes? It provides a visualisation of map edits from yesterday, last week or the last month. You can find the source code on GitHub.

… openmaptiles.org? Petr Pridal and Jiri Komarek gave a presentation about the topic at SotM 2018 in Milan. The slides are available here.

Other “geo” things

Arjen Luijendijk and others present inScientific Reports a global-scale assessment of the occurrence of sandy beaches and the rate at which their shorelines are changing. They used the global shoreline from the OpenStreetMap dataset of 2016 along with satellite imagery from Landsat and Sentinel.

[1] without words 😉

The New York Times reports that people are relying on placenames found on Google Maps to the extent that they are replacing historical local names. This happens even when the Google names are typographical errors, or the result of SEO (search engine optimisation).

Vietnam has a new attraction, a very unusual footbridge with construction seemingly inspired by a fantasy movie. The bridge named Cầu Vàng (English: Golden Bridge) is 150 m long, with a spectacular view across the Ba Na Mountain chain all the way to the South China Sea. Geo.de has a report (automatic translation) about it. This region, which is a recreation area with many attractions, is unfortunately only sparsely mapped on OSM. On Bing and Esri aerial imagery quite a few features are easily identifiable.

According to an article at Route Fifty, a website targeting readers from local and state governments in the US, the government sector will increasingly use cloud-based mapping to assist residents and rescuers during disasters. Mapbox already partners with many government agencies in the data science sector. The available statistical data would be used to coordinate where to target aid.

At ESRI’s 38th annual user conference the company showed its updated dynamic ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World with new data and capabilities. New features include the visualisation of historical, forecasting, and real-time data such as temperatures or global population growth models. Other new features are the OSM vector basemap and wayback imagery, allowing travel up to five years back in time.

As several media outlets have reported, and you may have already noticed, Google Maps is no longer flat and will reveal its sphericality if you zoom out far enough.

StreetCred attempts to estimate the actual number of POIs, in a test subset of cities across the globe, by assuming that a POI can’t exist without a road that leads to it. With additional data, the prediction will become increasingly accurate, and will help identify areas where more mapping would be beneficial.

Joshua tested the Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT bicycle computer and he discovered that it violates the GPL and various other Open Source Licences.

SotM 2018 Milan

[1] State of the Map, the global OpenStreetMap Conference, happened last weekend in Milan, Italy from the 28th to the 30th of July 2018. You can watch the recorded videos on their YouTube channel and find all the pictures here.

From SotM Milan 2018: an overview of the first day’s activities from various presentations.

On behalf of the Mapbox team at SotM, Jinal said how much they were looking forward to seeing people at in Milan. In case you did not find the time, or live in a part of the world far away from Italy, she gives a list of other OSM related conferences where you will be able to meet the team.

On the OSM blog Harry Wood says thanks to the visitors and organisers of the SotM in Milan. There are already unedited videos of the two main conference rooms linked from the article.

During SotM a Memorandum of Understanding between the OSGeo Foundation and Youthmappers was signed. The agreement proposes to establish a collaborative relationship in several areas such as research, education and conference participation.OSGeo is an organisation that promotes the adoption of open geospatial technology, Youthmappers is a university consortium of 120 campuses in 38 countries active in the humanitarian and development sector.

State of the Map 2019 will take place at Heidelberg University, Germany, from 21st to 23rd September.

About us

weeklyOSM is now published in Korean. Korean is spoken by about 80 million people, mainly in Korea but it is also an official language in two Chinese regions. OSM-related news can now be read in Japanese, Czech, English, Spanish, French, German and Korean. According to a Tweet from Geoffrey Kateregga we may welcome a Swahili version of our issue soon. Swahili is spoken by about 50 to 100 million people in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique and Congo. 고급협동조합 and Geoffrey are still looking for partners to help them. weeklyOSM is looking for a better flag to use for the Korean language in the WordPress plugin qTranslate.

Mapping

Rarely has a discussion in OSM escalated so quickly as it did following an email to the talk-us mailing list about unconnected lines that were supposed to become sidewalks.

jgon6 was dissatisfied that there was no convincing way to tag fairgrounds (showgrounds). A map note gave him a heads up and he looked into the issue again. He wrote an email to the tagging mailing list and published a dairy post, in which he laid out his extensive thoughts and findings about the different ways of tagging to get other people’s views on it.

Community

Researchers from the Politecnico di Milano investigated criticism of OSM around the unknown quality of data collected by unqualified mappers. In a journal paper they report on the comparison of the number and spatial accuracy of 1 million buildings in OSM and 2.8 million buildings in an authoritative dataset from the Lombardy region in Northern Italy. They concluded that at the 1:5000 scale the quality is at least comparable with the reference data. In terms of completeness OSM has 57% of the buildings found in the public dataset. The researchers also found that 9% of the buildings in OSM were not in the reference dataset.

Philipp Koster (HSR Rapperswil) published an OSM based Area of Interest (AOI) dataset for Switzerland. Google introduced the AOI concept (high activity areas shown as orange shaded areas on their maps) in 2016 but did not disclose the algorithms used to create it. Prof. Stefan Keller presented this work in the academic track at SotM.

In his blog “Maps Matter” SK53 wrote about how the completeness of data in OSM can be estimated without using external datasets for comparison. The question becomes particularly important when thinking about the generation of Areas-of-Interest, which requires POIs to be reasonably complete. His idea is that the number of POIs over time should develop similarly to Species Accumulation Curves (at first increasing slowly but then accelerating and finally leveling off ). The article details step by step his approach of investigating the question for shops in the UK using Overpass, Osmium and PostgreSQL. He concluded that there are still a lot of shops to be added, even in the best-mapped places. Some shop types, shop=supermarket and shop=doityourself, do show signs of slowdown. In terms of the number of distinct values forshop= he found the curve tailed off and suggests that the existing shop tags are sufficient to meet our tagging needs. Joost Schoope pointed out that a similar approach has already been used for roads.

The eighth edition of the Belgian Open Summer of Code project ended last week. It was bigger than ever and used OpenStreetMap heavily, as illustrated by Pieter Vander Vennet’s diary post.

We are looking forward to the results of the user profgreenington’s bachelor thesis. He reports in a diary post (automatic translation) that his topic is the generation of indoor maps, in digital as well as in paper form.

Richard Fairhurst wrote a forward-looking blog post about implementing vector tiles, placing this centre stage in a comprehensive overview of the OSM context. He recalled the very first days of OSM, summarised the current situation, noted the constantly repeated argument that OSM is a database not a map, made it clear why we are not and why we don’t want to be Google or Apple maps, touched on contributor motivation and diversity and brought it all together to argue for restylable vector tiles on openstreetmap.org as a tool to generate customised maps. The article also offers refreshingly calm words about machine learning/AI in the OSM environment and visual feedback on maps as a motivator for contributors.

Ilya Zverev supplemented Richard’s blog post on vector tiles. In his diary post he points out that the OSM carto developers are approaching the change to vector tiles only as a technical task, which he sees as a mistake. His point is that our style is overshadowing our product, i.e. geospatial data. He suggested that users should look elsewhere for nice-looking OSM maps and the OSM website should focus foremost on data and possibilities. He recommends that OSM delivers raw vector tiles coupled with an improved map builder including a style database containing hundreds of styles.

Imports

In a tweet Allan Walker points to his visualisation of the number of buildings in OSM compared to Microsoft’s building footprint dataset for the United States. As you can see, in number terms Microsoft is leading, by far, in all states except Massachusetts.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Raphael Das Gupta welcomes OSM local chapters to join the dedicated mailing list. Collaboration and exchange of experiences among local chapters is encouraged, as well as interaction with the OSMF Board and the various working groups.

Some of our OpenStreetMap servers were moved from Imperial College London to their new home at Equinix in Amsterdam. You may have experienced some slower response times during the transition period prior to the move, which was successfully completed on Wednesday, July 25th. updated – thx, Dorothea 😉

Events

Micro Mapping Party with Mapathon, Hackathon and AskMeAnything in Rapperswil (Switzerland), Friday, August 17, 2018, 14:00-~21:00

The call for the venue for the State of the Map Africa 2019 is now open. It will be close on September 30th, 2018.

Humanitarian OSM

HOT Conversations at SotM 2018: you can find the full list of talks, workshops and birds-of-a-feather about OSM and humanitarian activities here. If you missed one of them or wish to rewatch it, videos and slides will be made available on this same page.

switch2OSM

The news site Moneycontrol reports that Uber is working on a plan to move from Google maps to OSM. weeklyOSM has recently reported about Uber’s plan to contribute to OSM in the Delhi region in India.

Programming

The OSM wiki now supports templates written in the Lua scripting language. It is hoped that this will improve the performance and maintainability of frequently used, complex templates such as the language selection bar.

Releases

JOSM developers just published release #14066, that brings several bugfixes and improvements.

Did you know …

… the sources of help if you have questions with regard to OSM? You can ask your question in the OSM forum, on one of the mailing lists and at Q&A site help.openstreetmap.org. Unlike the forum or mailing lists, the site is not intended for discussions, but for factual questions for which there is ideally an objectively correct answer. If you want to help others with your OSM knowledge, take a look at the list of unanswered questions. Maybe you deserve a place in the points list?

OSM in the media

William Plummer of the French newspaper Le Figaro has analyzed the naming of streets in Paris with the help of OSM data. In addition to the birth years of the namesakes, the professions were also represented graphically.

Other “geo” things

The news agency Bloomberg reports that Mapbox claims to have a role in the future of ride-hailing and autonomous cars. With its customers Uber and its rival Lyft, Mapbox has already a foot in the door for the technology that is seen as the future of mobility.

The ESA has launched four additional Galileo-satellites using Ariane 5. The new satellites, which are expected to have a life span of 12 years, join their 22 peers in space. The Galileo system requires exactly 26 satellites for becoming fully operational. However, another four are still in maintenance mode and reserve satellites will have to be launched later for full coverage.

The website GIS Lounge reports that hydrologists from two US universities have developed a worldwide river and stream surface dataset. They used Landsat satellite imagery, field measurements from thousand of gauge stations and statistical models in its creation. The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licensed dataset, called Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL) Database, is available for download.

The photographer Susana Vera (Reuters) visited the two last inhabitants of the old village of La Estrella in the very sparsely populated province of Teruel in northeastern Spain. The result was a photo gallery (Spiegel Online). The village, as well as others in the province, are suffering a rural exodus. Thirty years ago there were still 200 inhabitants living in La Estrella. Once a year the church is used by pilgrims. A sad chapter in the struggle for “survival” in the European province. The two old ones about themselves: “The idiots who stayed”. For the OSM community this means rethinking in place – tagging.